The United States Navy is looking to finally make its highly-touted laser technology a reality this summer, when it will deploy its first laser weapon on a warship.

In fact, the Navy’s laser weapon has progressed far enough that
when it’s deployed and tested on the USS Ponce, it can be
controlled by a lone sailor.

Meanwhile, the Navy also plans to outfit one of its ships with an
electromagnetic rail gun within two years. Speaking to the
Associated Press, Navy Capt. Mike Ziv, a program manager at the
Naval Sea Systems Command, said making these technologies
operational “fundamentally changes the way” the United States
conducts warfare.

The solid-state Laser Weapons System, for example, would allow
the navy to effectively neutralize threats such as aerial drones
and swarm boats by shooting them with a beam of intense heat and
destroying their internal parts. Electromagnetic rail guns,
meanwhile, could potentially replace traditional guns with a
system that fires GPS-guided projectiles up to seven times faster
than the speed of sound.

Perhaps even more importantly, these new weapons systems –
particularly the lasers – would be far cheaper to operate than
current technology. As RT reported last year, a single Tomahawk
missile costs the United States $1.4 million dollars. A laser
could bring prices down to a few dollars a shot – and, unlike
one-and-done missiles, a laser could be fired continuously.

Still, at this point the military benefits are simply conjecture,
since problems remain with both systems. Lasers typically become
much less effective when the weather turns sour, meaning that
rain or dust storms could severely shorten their range. Loren
Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, told the
AP that while the Navy claims to have figured out how to operate
lasers in poor weather, the weapon’s range would likely still
shrink.

The electromagnetic gun, on the other hand, requires so much
power to operate that none of the Navy’s current crop of ships
can actually benefit from its existence. The Navy’s massive new destroyer, the $3.5 billion
USS Zumwalt, is the only vessel that will be capable of using
such a weapon, though it’s still under construction. The
technology used in the Zumwalt class of destroyers is expected to
eventually make its way into other Navy vessels.

Despite the hurdles that still need to be cleared, the US intends
to move forward with these projects. Since 2005, the military has
invested $240 million into the rail gun project, and its laser
systems are reportedly further ahead of schedule than those being
developed by other countries.

"It's fair to say that there are other countries working on
this technology. That's safe to say,” Ziv told the AP.
“But I would also say that a lot of what makes this
successful came from the way in which we consolidated all of the
complexity into something that can be operated by (a single
sailor).”